Functional programming is becoming increasingly widespread in industry. This trend is driven by the adoption of Scala as the main programming language for many applications. Scala fuses functional and object-oriented programming in a practical package. It interoperates seamlessly with both Java and Javascript. Scala is the implementation language of many important frameworks, including Apache Spark, Kafka, and Akka. It provides the core infrastructure for sites such as Twitter, Tumblr and also Coursera.
In this course you will discover the elements of the functional programming style and learn how to apply them usefully in your daily programming tasks. You will also develop a solid foundation for reasoning about functional programs, by touching upon proofs of invariants and the tracing of execution symbolically.
The course is hands on; most units introduce short programs that serve as illustrations of important concepts and invite you to play with them, modifying and improving them. The course is complemented by a series programming projects as homework assignments.
Learning Outcomes. By the end of this course you will be able to:
- understand the principles of functional programming,
- write purely functional programs, using recursion,
pattern matching, and higher-order functions,
- combine functional programming with objects and classes,
- design immutable data structures,
- reason about properties of functions,
- understand generic types for functional programs
Recommended background: You should have at least one year programming experience. Proficiency with Java or C# is ideal, but experience with other languages such as C/C++, Python, Javascript or Ruby is also sufficient. You should have some familiarity using the command line.

From the lesson

Collections

After a deep-dive into Lists, this week we'll explore other data structures; vectors, maps, ranges, arrays, and more. We'll dive into Scala's powerful and flexible for-comprehensions for querying data.